Medium Dawn Felagund of the Fountain

I have been, as is the norm for me, up to my ears in Everything. Most of it is (as usual) work, but I've been up to some fannish stuff too that I'd love to share. So, first, some links!

• The Fading of the Elves: Techno-volunteerism and the Disappearance of Tolkien Fan Fiction Archives. I wrote this symposium article (on encouragement by Maria :) for the special Platforms edition of Transformative Works and Cultures. The crux of the article is the disappearance of single-fandom archives and what precipitates that. I argue that it's technology + volunteers ... techno-volunteerism, to use the term coined by Abigail De Kosnik! In short, people who are willing to volunteer their time time learn the technology needed to maintain an archive or other fannish platform. While viable options for doing so have dwindled in the wake of eFiction's demise, there has been a dearth too of education, support, and mentorship opportunities (although this does seem to be changing, I hope). Finally, the invisibility—an intentional choice on the part of those of us who do this work—can be grinding. Everyone else is hanging out, chatting, writing and reading stories, and you're updating software. Yet independent, small archives are a vital part of the fannish ecosystem, so what needs to change to make them a viable part again?



• Discord as a Fandom Platform: Locating a New Playground by Welmoed Fenna Wagenaar. This one is not mine, obviously, but it appears in the same special edition of TWC, and one of the two Discord servers discussed is the SWG! The author uses the lens of play to study how "users interact with and negotiate rule-based structures and designs" on a Discord server. The SWG functions in the article mostly as an example of a moderated space, but I'm okay with that. I'm proud of the work my comoderators do on the server to keep it a safe and friendly space!



• Ten Important Moments in Tolkien Fanfiction History. For February's Cultus Dispatches column, I thought I'd give myself an "easy month," which I think I defined at the time as "no data to crunch or graphics of said data to make," for the Organization for Transformative Works' challenge to write a "10 things" essay about fandom Ha. HA. This was not an easy article to write! In fact, I think it was my most challenging Cultus article to date. Not only did I have to choose ten things (which is very political and potentially fraught, as more than one person who clearly thought this was a bad idea pointed out), but I had to do enough research to speak with some authority on all of them. I quite liked the resulting article, though. It was worth the effort!



• Grief, Grieving, and Permission to Mourn in the Quenta Silmarillion (text, audio, and slideshow). This is my presentation for this year's Tolkien at UVM Conference. The theme was Tolkien and Psychology, and this was my attempt to achieve a tenuous connection to the theme while yattering on, yet again, about narrative bias with a hearty scoop of quantitative data. In this presentation, I look at the data not only on death in the Quenta Silmarillion (who dies? and how? ... other than "lots" and "violently," that is) but on grief and mourning. What I've discovered is, yet again, Tolkien has constructed a pseudohistorical text that shows clear narrative bias, this time using death and mourning rituals cast certain characters in politicized ways. In other words, some characters go conspicuously ungrieved and unmourned. Others receive more than their fair share, and very often, this seems to be motivated by a desire to distract from what they were up to when they died. (Fair warning that I knock a few heroes of The Silmarillion off of their tear-washed and haunted pedestals, including my own namesake!)

So Tolkien at UVM was this weekend. This is honestly one of my favorite weekends out of the year. Grundy comes up from Jersey, sian22redux comes down from Ontario, and we have a splendiferously nerdy weekend in Burlington, closing places down because we get so involved in talking (not just about Tolkien! but there's a bit of Tolkien stuff in there too!) that we tend to lose track of how late it is until we realize they are putting up the chairs around us ...

The conference itself is excellent every year. Vermont is a bit out of the way, and early April is not the best time to be in Vermont (it's usually rainy and cold, and it's mud season, though that's less noticeable in B-ton), but the conference itself is always warm and friendly and fun. (And Vermont any time of year is itself a friendly place with great food, minimal crowds, and cheap/free parking!) This year's presentations were excellent, as I have come to expect from many years now attending this conference; several of them got my brain turning in new ways, including about my own topic, which I might expand on for one of the hybrid conferences coming up this summer.

I am a very introverted person and usually have to be coaxed into socializing. (Once I'm with my friends, I have a good time. But I rarely look forward to hanging out with people beyond a very small circle.) And the past five years have hacked away at me until I feel like I have no soft edges left; i.e., I am sometimes a crabby person. I am very often in the role these days of "advocate," which means I don't get to go with the flow, and I say "fuck" a lot. But I do look forward to this weekend so much each year and cracking out of my shell, and I'm actually feeling sad right now that it's over.

I have been busy with fandom stuff over the past month or so. Some of this stuff is going to be old news to the people who are reading here. But for everyone else, here's a month's worth of fannish things!

First of all, my paper Affirmational and Transformational Values and Practices in the Tolkien Fanfiction Community has been published in the Journal of Tolkien Research. JTR is open-access, so you can read the whole thing for free. Yay, JTR!

The paper is the culmination of a lot of years of research and griping in fannish spaces that really originated with my observation, when I first started reading scholarly work about fanfiction, that much of my marginalia was along the lines of "Not Tolkien fanfiction!" I loved fan studies meta so much but felt like much of it wasn't about me and what I did. For the longest time, because of this sense, I focused on what made Tolkien fanfiction different from other fandoms' fanfiction, which was not the most productive approach, since that's comparing a single, very diverse entity to an enormously vast category (with tens of thousands of also very diverse entities) where every conclusion drew a ready exception. Instead, I started looking more at the theories in the scholarship and encountered the idea of affirmational/transformational fandom first put forth by obsession_inc, that places fanfiction largely within "transformational fandom." (Affirmational fandom values the original creator's authority, including the canon, while transformational values the fan's freedom to rework, reinterpret, and repair the original text based on the fan's own experiences.) I found that that didn't mesh well with my understanding of Tolkien fanfiction, which I see as a mixture of both types. (And to be clear, obsession_inc was not proposing a binary, but fan studies' work has leaned heavily toward the transformational.) So I dug a bit deeper into the research and found that, yes, my survey data, as well as other evidence, supported my sense, as a Tolkien fanfic writer myself, that we don't fit as comfortably on the transformational side as fan studies scholars have suggested of other fanfic. (I have my doubts there too, but I am not familiar enough with those fandoms to comment any deeper than that, so I'll let others do that work if they agree.) The article presents my research and conclusions that, ultimately, how we negotiate canon and authority and critical and reparative motives in our fandom is really complicated and shapes not only the stories we write but how we've built our communities.

Over December break, I finished two stories. First, I finished Home Alone: Forgotten in Formenos (SWG), my Silm/Home Alone crossover. This was rough, in the midst of losing Lancelot. I wrote the final 14K words in the two days before Christmas and did the "Battle Plan" map on Christmas. He was my constant companion in the study while I was working, so it was nice to finish it for him. I know Christmas is past, as is likely the taste for this story, but I'm still just happy I finished it. And hey, my sister-in-law listens to Christmas music year-round, so she can't be the only one who can tolerate jollitude outside the parameters of Thanksgiving-Epiphany that we impose in my family. It's also on my website and AO3.

I also wrote a Tolkien Secret Santa pinch hit for fernstrike: Yule Lights (SWG). Here's the summary:

As the new lord of Ost-in-Edhil, Celebrimbor must preside over a Yule festivity lacking what he loved of the celebration when he was younger, elements that have become fraught by association with Fëanor, but Annatar has a surprise for him.

It's also on my website and AO3.

Fun-lovin' wild woman that I am, my treat to myself over December break was setting up a page on Fanlore for Tolkien Fanfiction. I just scratched the surface, then RaisingCain added more after me. But it's our page. Go add stuff, even a single sentence or link to a fanwork. Or much more than that. Go tame; go wild. Just know its ours for our history and everyone is welcome.

And finally, I'll be presenting again this year at the Tolkien at UVM conference, which is on April 4 at the University of Vermont. Anyone who is going or who might be interested, let me know!

I am presently on the train to New York, for the New York Tolkien Conference, stopped in Brattleboro in sight of Whetstone, the excellent nanobrewery that changes their beer menu daily. My train left Waterbury ... at 10:20, more than four and a half hours ago.

No, Vermont is not that big. The train was slowing down to stop in Brattleboro, people were standing in the aisles collecting their luggage, when the brakes went on hard. I heard one of the conductors say, "Uh oh, what happened?"

Remember last time I was on the Vermonter, when the train in front of us derailed? I didn't think we'd top that.

A few minutes later, the conductor came over the PA system. The train struck a "trespasser" (their words; I detest it in this context, although I understand the legal reasoning for it), who was pronounced dead immediately.

This was at 1:30, so two and a half hours later, we are just beginning to move. You know what? I don't care. I keep thinking about the poor person on the tracks, the "trespasser," and wonder why they were there, did they not hear the train? Or ...? To be fair, everyone was really decent about it, at least in my car, even though quite a few people were destined for Brattleboro, which was just a short walk away. No one complained, although the people seated near me for some reason misunderstood universally (maybe hopefully?) that the train had hit an animal. Ever the Mary Sunshine, I corrected them.

I did get a lot of work done while waiting, and some non-work too. I remember reading someone once remarking that many academics write their conference presentations on the plane to the conference. I couldn't do that! Anyone who knows me knows that my inner Hermione is hyperventilating at the mere thought. Of course I am not an academic and don't really aim to be! But I did do much of the Powerpoint on the train, so maybe that qualifies me to move up from baby-scholar status to wannabe-scholar. (I'm never sure what to call myself. The s-word seems fraught.)

I'm going to get something to eat. And a beer. I was expecting to arrive in the city in two hours and we just crossed into Massachusetts. I'm hungry, but I couldn't bring myself to buy pizza and beer while a person was dead under the train.

This week was pretty busy, mostly with getting ready for the conference (I think Oshun will be happy to not get any emails from me for a few days! I clicked the wrong button my phone today, and she was listed as my only Frequent Contact, which sums up my last week quite succinctly!) but also continuing to work on the house. We painted the living room and hallway this week, which involved a lot of taping and finicky, detailed work and so took longer than I wanted to spend on it.

We had fun too. On Sunday, we climbed Mount Pisgah, the third-highest mountain in the Northeast Kingdom, with both dogs. We didn't mean to. We thought we were climbing the more modest nearby Bald Mountain, but Vermont played a joke on us and had two identically named roads on opposite sides of the access area, with both trails blazed in blue. The only clue was to "walk east" from the access area, and I guess we walked west. (We did, I realize now that I'm thinking about us in relation to nearby Lake Willoughby, but I honestly wasn't thinking about it. I saw the road name, Bobby found the blue blaze, and we were both like, "HERE.") We made it to the top--even Lance! our little old man--and the view was as stunning as one would expect of the third-highest mountain in the Northeast Kingdom and overlooking Lake Willoughby to boot. We only figured out that it was the wrong mountain because there was supposed to be a fire tower and wasn't!

Oh am I out of shape! Remember when I was snowshoeing up mountains this winter? Four months of thesis-writing followed by all the chaos of moving (and making it to the gym maybe twice per week and usually copping out and doing weights when I did) means that ain't happening unless I get back to work.

On Wednesday, we took our trusty old inflatable Sea Eagle kayak out on the Barton River that runs near our house. We rowed (and floated a good deal, enjoying the scenery, the wildlife, and some incredibly scented flower that we never identified) for three and a half hours and made it most the way to the South Bay of Lake Memphremagog and back. We now know that if we row more than we float, we can easily make it. (If we cross the entire South Bay to Newport, we can treat ourselves to a nice lunch as well, but our neighbor says that it is ten miles from the access area near our house, so we might have to build up to that.)

We saw and heard these massive brown birds and assumed, they're massive so they'll be easy to identify, right? And it's Vermont, so it's not like there are hundreds of species of things. We've struck out utterly. Anything that lives in Vermont that looks like them doesn't sound anything like them.

Yesterday was Lancelot's ninth birthday, so we took both Goldens to Prouty Beach on Lake Mem in the evening and let them get in the water. It was Gwen's first time in the water, and she jumped and splashed with such unbridled joy that, when she'd stop, she had to catch her breath. Lance frolicked a little too but mostly acted like an old man in a pool and stood belly deep in the water. Gwen also treated herself to a nice roll in the sand that left her filthy. (Whose birthday was it again?)

I have so much catching up to do--including pictures from our various adventures!--but for now it is pizza and beer time.

Okay, at long last, I am sharing the video of my presentation at the New York Tolkien Conference here. The full title (which will not fit in the space allotted for titles) is "The Loremasters of Fëanor: Historical Bias in the Works of J.R.R. Tolkien and Transformative Works." It discusses both the evidence for historical bias in Tolkien's works (especially The Silmarillion) and how the fan community uses that bias to create fanworks.



You won't be able to see the data and other visual aids on the screen behind me. That data (as well as a detailed synopsis of the paper) is available on my blog The Heretic Loremaster.

Also, a friendly reminder that The Heretic Loremaster does have a feed set up on both LJ and DW at heretic_lore_feed. Following this feed will bring new HL posts directly to your flist. Because my journal has come to be just that--a journal--it is usually the last place that I bring fannish stuff; however, I know a lot of people who friended me here did so because of our shared fandom involvement, so if you miss seeing that stuff here, the HL feed might help a bit. (Just a bit because it is infrequently updated thanks to my grad school schedule!) Also, please remember that I have no ownership or control over this feed, which means that I don't receive comments left on feed posts. Please comment directly on the posts themselves; no membership is required to do so.

The paper will eventually be available to read but I need to clean up citations first. If you don't mind my sloppy sourcing and want a copy early, just let me know.

The full title (which DW will not let me post in its entirety) is "At the Root of the Tree of Tales:
Using Comparative Myth and 'On Fairy-Stories' to Analyze Tolkien's Cosmogony." This is a video of me reading--very exciting!--my paper at Mythmoot today. I hope the paper is more interesting than 17 minutes of watching me read, part of the time obscured by my computer before Bobby realized and moved the camera. ;)

Anyway, the YouTube summary, which I will reuse because I am too tired to make new, is:

This paper, presented at the Mythmoot II conference in Baltimore on 15 December 2013, looks at J.R.R. Tolkien's creation story, the "Ainulindale," in comparison to other world creation myths. The paper touches on similarities between Tolkien's story and other myths and the reasons for those connections but emphasizes how the differences--particularly the use of subcreation and creation through music--emphasize themes of integral importance to Tolkien's fictional world and life as an author.

If you'd rather listen to the paper as a podfic, the audio file is on the SWG here. If anyone wants a copy of the paper, email me at DawnFelagund@gmail.com; it will eventually be published in the conference proceedings (which I believe are going to be publicly available and which I will naturally link to when they are).

Well, it's official! My paper proposal for Mythmoot II has been accepted! *subdued and slightly terrified squeeeee* This will be my first conference presentation. However, since it specifically encourages fans, students, and first-time presenters, then I think it's as good a time as any to take this particular plunge. This means I need to double-down on preparing for it, though; I've been negligent here, in part because I think I didn't want to get my hopes up and ... :^|

The conference is in Baltimore, and I'm hoping that maybe I see some fellow Silmgeeks there ...? :D

In other good news, it is Friday, and I have survived the first two weeks of school in one piece. The beginning of the year is always the hardest part. It's lots of single-class lessons, which means more planning. Next week, I will be settling in to reading some texts with my classes that should take more than a class period to get through.

In other good news, Bobby is making another attempt at The Silmarillion and seems to be enjoying it more this time than the other two (??) times he's tried it. He has been taking Mythgard courses with me, so I think he likes being able to connect it in to the larger history and mythology ... exactly the opposite of how I did things, which was to read the Silm and then become interested in the history and mythology. He's at present pondering something that I'm nudging him to write up and post to the SWG. I'm shameless. I've been trying to get him into the Silm for years.

Okay, to close out, I have some cute pictures. Well, one is probably only cute to me, but the other is most likely cute to anyone warm-blooded.

( Cute Pictures )